Danilo Bortoli: It’s been five years since Anitta first broke out as she attempted to make funk carioca the sound of Brazilian pop. “Vai Malandra,” the last release culled from her Check Mate monthly series, is the final encapsulation of that task. Not only because it atests to her omnipresence and popularity, but also because she’s better than anyone else right now when it comes to forging the line between the favelas and the radio (the video is a glorious proof of that). The funny thing is that simply herself would have been just enough. No need for embarrasing, half-assed verses, which steals from her personality, her greatest asset. [7]

Ryo Miyauchi: Anitta stunts a little too smooth atop the horn riff, with full awareness it will get people moving no matter what she decides to do. MC Zaac approaches it more playfully, honking the beat like the clown nose that it is. But by the time the song they turn it over to Maejor, it’s too cooled off to be the dance-floor shaker that it could potentially be.[5]

Iain Mew: The vocalists each try their best to escape, but ultimately all fall down in the face of the joke shop honk. [4]

Jonathan Bradley: The honking melody has the same silliness that earned a strain of dubstep the sobriquet “clownstep,” but as these horns repeat, locking in with the rhythm, they take on a seamier air: the carnivalesque beneath the circus. Maejor extends the celebration from Rio to the rest of the Western hemisphere; he sounds like a Big Sean worldly enough to be cosmopolitan.[6]

Julian Axelrod: “Man, I wish I knew Portuguese. Maybe I’d like the song if I could understand it better,” I thought as I listened to Anita and MC Zaac’s flirty back-and-forth. Then I heard Maejor’s sub-Tyga horndog schtick and thought, “Nah, I’m good.”[3]

Maxwell Cavaseno: Its going for flirty cheek, but it ends up somewhere closer to pancake flat; a weird midway point of carioca and years old Derulo crossover ideas reduced to perhaps the dumbest possible notes. MC Zaac and Maejor’s presences do little more than provide further dullness and if this was meant to help make Anitta feel like someone of note, perhaps there should’ve been notes besides the dull march-along melody everyone on the song seems to squeeze lifelessly.[1]

Reader average: [3] (2 votes)

The marketing was all about how this is a return to her roots, but this is nothing like what she did in her MC Anitta days. This is purely the sound of funk these days, when São Paulo has taken the reign and it’s more paulista than carioca, with some of the good ideas and touches from recent hits (Bumbum Granada, Bum Bum Tam Tam and Vai Embrazando, from the top of my head) lifted and ironed out into a hook machine. But MC Zaac gets all the good bits, while Anitta is in a lower vocal register than she should be, so in her time to shine she just sounds a bit dead. I feel like Anitta as a potential international superstar has given me a lot of hype and diminishing returns.